Alligatorsneeze

This took me a little bit of poking around to figure out, so here's a quick tip in case others are attempting to do the same thing.

For some CCK select options, you want it to both be required and to also not default on the first answer because a user might click through without changing the default without meaning to. There is the Default value options you can play with, but the easiest way I've found is in your Allowed values list you can simply enter this as your first choice:

This will give you the -Please Choose- as a default, but if the user doesn't switch it, an error will come up. The reason for this is it's expecting you to have your answer in a format such as 1|Option 1, with the "machine" or "key" name first, followed by a pipe, and then the name of the option a user will see. If you don't give it a machine name it simply isn't valid.